From the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV headquarters to Norman Foster's sprawling airport terminal, there is no shortage of ambitious modern architecture in Beijing.

But what the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art plans to show in its first architecture exhibition includes the drawing, film and other media by Yung Ho Chang, a Chinese architect who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cites Hitchcock and Duchamp as influences and co-founded Feichang Jianzhu, a design "atelier" whose name can translate, depending on pronunciation, to "unusual architecture" or "very architectural."

"What is contemporary Chinese culture?" Mr. Chang, 56 years old, asks. "I don't think anyone really knows. But we like to really figure it out to some extent through our work. It's not just about production of buildings or design. There is this bigger concern."

The show's title, "Material-ism," is a play on the constructive work his practice does as well as the materialism that he calls "at the same time very familiar for people in China and still very strange."